sylla

Then, after your careful review, our lack of Pompeian accounts on Pharsalus of any kind has been confirmed. Both Suetonius, but especially Plutarch, were rigorous researchers; writing close to two centuries after Pharsalus, the only alternative account they were able to quote came from the Caesarian Pollio, in all likelihood because they found no other. In any case, Suetonius wrote nothing about the battle, and most of what Plutarch wrote (the pila trick included) came explicitly from Caesar

A shorter period of time? The Romans were present in Britain for 367 years, they officially (not counting Caesar's brief flirtation in 55/54BC) arrived in 43AD under the invasion of Claudius and finally left the island for good in 407 AD when Constantine III was proclaimed emperor by the Roman troops in Britain and crossed the Channel with all of the remaining units of the British garrison, Roman Britain effectively ended. The inhabitants were forced to be responsible for their own defence and government

I'm not intirely sure but I would hazard a guess it was probably something to do with when the Anglo Saxons arrived in the 5th Century?? That didn't answer the question; there were plenty of Germanic invaders all over the whole former Western Empire, and in most of it the romance languages are still alive.

Alan Moore's The Watchmen. A fascinating depiction of an alternate history for the late XX century.

Check out your sources; despite its name, Lucan's Pharsalia tell us nothing about the battle itself. From all your quoted sources, Cassius Dio is the only one that actually described the battle, essentially copying from Caesar's account. As far as I'm aware of, no Pompeian accounts of the battle survived.

"The latest news is the discovery of six silver denarii which narrows the date of the battle down to between AD230 and AD235: one of Caracalla, three of Elagabalus, and two of Severus Alexander". Coins in Kalefeld

Livy's mess probably came directly from his primary sources, like Polybius and Antias. This was in all likelihood related to the shame for the subsequent Roman defeat at Callicinus by Perseus, a deeply despised adversary. As you said, there's no scholar consensus regarding the chronology; my impression is that Sicinius led a preemptive strike before the opening of the consular year, as Perseus' cause at the Senate was doomed from the beginning; however, the Romans subsequently lost their initiative, mainly because of their overconfidence and petty bureaucratic arguments.

Women's cognomina were quite uncommon at any time, and they seem to have had few or none fixed rules; they could have been derived from their paternal (or even maternal) cognomen, from their husband's nomen or cognomen, or even from personal peculiarities. For example, the famous empress Poppaea Sabina used the nomen and cognomen from her maternal grandfather in official epigraphy, even being a widow, after a previous divorce (from Otho) and of course after marrying Nero.. The name "Apicata" might have been a cognomen by itself, if her father was indeed from the Apicia gens, like the famous gourmet Marcus Gavius (or Gabius) Apicius; so her full name might very well have been at some time Gavia Apicata Sejana. Nowhere have I found any hint that deleting the (rarely acquired) husband's cognomen was considered regular or required practice for divorced women at any time.

Is there any textual evidence on Mark Anthony or Cleopatra being buried at all?

Well obviously after the war they gave much more accurate figures. However, at the start of the war when Operation Barbossa was so successful, Stalin would not tell Soviet citizens the real numbers for fear of mass panic. ATG The Sovietic example was quoted here because it was paramount and undisputable; the shameless manipulation of their casualty figures was standard practice and it's easy to check it out; for example, within the memoirs of marshall Konstantin Rokossovskiy. At the end of the Great Patriotic War (WWII) Stalin was in Postdam looking for the payment of reparations and was undertandably trying to maximize his casualty figures (up to 20-23 millions); even so, it was most likely an underestimation, mostly explained by faulty registration. The current estination is around 26,600,000.

There are many potential alternatives that we simply can't exclude; for example: Was Apicata really divorced? Couldn't Tacitus have erred or his text been corrupted? Couldn't Sejanus and Apicata have just re-married? Why were the Sejanii inscribed in the Fasti Ostiensis to begin with? They lived and died in Rome. Were the Ostians aware of Apicata's civil status? Even more, what do we know about public records' style? The traditionally restored phrase is "...APICATA SEIANI..."; did this formula really imply a fortiori that they were still married? Is there no other explanation? As far as I know, "Seiani" simply stated a conexion with Sejanus. How should a divorced and still unmarried woman be called? Shouldn

Regarding Cannae and similar cases, and at the risk of overstating the obvious, big Roman casualties' figures can also have been used as Roman propaganda, irrespectively of their reliability; certainly not for Varro here, but via Hannibal for Scipio, magnifying then the magnitude of the latter's victory over the former.

There's some Hellenic dark humor too: "An intellectual got a slave pregnant. At the birth, his father suggested that the child be killed. The intellectual replied: "First murder your own children and then tell me to kill mine"."

Contemporary: Walter Scheidel. Antiquity: Caius Asinius Pollio.

Judging from the trailers, the depicted Roman military equipment seems quite uniform: there are virtually no pila, only hastae; mostly loricae segmentata, with some squamata for the officers; gladii and Gallic helmets.

Prima facie, the best idea I have heard for any film on classical times for years. I can't imagine how can this film avoid being either feminist or anticlerical.

Thanks for this nice piece of scholar research. The relevant fragment of the Fasti Ostiensis depicts chronologically the deaths of five members of Sejanus' family across the late 31 AD; the third one, presumably Sejanus' wife (name erased, traditionally considered as "Apicata") commited suicide VII Kalendas November (October 26), after Sejanus himself and his older son Strabo, but before the younger children, contradicting so the only surviving report by Dio (58.11) of the children's death as the cause of Apicata's suicide. The traditional interpretation has been that Dio simply erred, a relatively common occurrence judging by the comparative parallel analysis with Tacitus' Annals. Ms. Bellemore suggests that the cognomen Apicata couldn't have been inscribed in the Fasti, mainly because it is too long (but even if that was the case; why not in an abbreviated form? Or just her Nomen? -possibly Gavia-) and also because Tacitus indicated Sejanus divorced Apicata eight years before (but Tacitus himself called Apicata Sejanus' wife in later quotes, not to mention Dio and others). Discarding Apicata, the author considers Livia's ("Livilla") name must have been there: Ms. B supports her thesis quoting plenty of textual references regarding Sejanus and Livia's desire to marry each other (but not one stating that they actually did it). Finally, Cassius Dio must now be wrong about Livia's demise. IMHO, a fascinating but hardly tenable hypothesis; too scarce evidence for quite an extraordinary claim. The traditional parsimonious interpretation is far more plausible.

You missed the point; Caesar was here so reluctant to admit the other side's merit (even in defeat) that he attributed most of his casualties to an accident (an Act of God, if you like). If any claims were absolutely impossible, they would hardly make good propaganda. Historical texts and figures are no dogma; we

All sources were Caesarian; no Pompeian account survived, and there's a reason for that. There were new recruits, auxiliaries and Gallic veterans in both sides (Labienus was the obvious example). In fact, Caesar frequently stressed his relative lack of veterans as an additional handicap; Thapsus was an excellent example, which BTW didn't prevent Caesar from the regular favorably unbalanced casualty report. However, my favorite would be Munda (presumably Hirtius' narrative); we're supossed to believe that: - After ruling for years 90% or more of the Roman world, the Dictator Caesar was unable to match the legionaires from the single rebel province of Hispania Ulterior (13 Pompeian legions versus 8 Caesarian). - Even so, the casualties balance was like 30:1 (please don't ask me which side was favored). Naturally, Caesar was not particularly original; the same applies to Scipio, Constantine and most Roman generals. There was a reason behind publicizing (and bumping up & down) battle reports: basic propaganda. We're dealing here with a literary heroic archetype older than History, analogous to the biblical Samson against the Philistines.

Ms. Beard's article and most of what I have heard and read in the media regarding the ongoing piracy acts in the Horn of Africa seem to have been gross oversimplifications of an extremely complex situation. The range of affected vessels has been truly global: Germany, France, Russia, Ukrania, China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea (BOTH!), Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and of course US, among others. Somalia is not only a failed state on active chronic civil war, but it's also disputed among many quasi-states (like Somaliland, Puntsland and so on). At this very moment, the precise identity and number of the pirates is still unclear, the same as their sponsors and their relationship with the local authorities and population; then, it's hard to define who should be targeted by the retaliation measures. MPC is right, a convoy strategy is evidently required; but at the end of the day, the real threat is not military but administrative; how and by whom should the criminals be punished? An international intervention will be most likely required; however, the United Nations have been traditionally pretty ineffectual dealing with this kind of situations. Under any potential scenario that I can imagine, this problem will in all likelihood worsen the already low life conditions of the Somalian population. Now, the rather obvious differences between the current Somalian piracy and the Pompey's war of 67 BC can't be stressed enough; Cilicia was then nominally ruled by a client puppet king of the residual Seleucid Syrian kingdom, so it was essentially a Roman territory. No country or authority would have disputed Rome's right to punish its brigands within its own territory, even if someone might have had the strength to try.

Most of the sources were remote and quite unreliable for this period, particularly the infamous Historia Augusta; the chronology is a real mess. Regardless the details, the Restitutor Orbis was killed by his Praetorian guard, as usual for the period; the material killer was identified as Mucapor (Thracian?). The story of a non-political conspiracy by a civilian notarius of low social status (named Eros by most sources except the HA, which called him "Mnestheus" probably because of the Greek word for notarius) might very well have been true, but it seems suspiciously convenient for the Praetorians, as both Tacitus and Probus (Aurelian's succesors) take the purported conspirators to trial and even executed at least some of them Ad Bestias, in the best Imperial tradition. Suspects? Countless; the Senate (or at least a significant fraction) would be my first bet, mainly because: -Aurelian had executed many senators. -From numismatic evidence, it's possible that a damnatio memoriae might have initially been decreed. -Aurelian's immediate succesor was a senator (the former consul Tacitus), an atypical fact for this period.

I see. That explains why they supposedly lost only 48.000 men at Cannae. Vale bene et nil desperandum, Salve, FV Analogous to the Soviets in 1941, the Romans acknowledged huge casualties only when they had no alternative, ie facing total disaster, like Carrhae or Arausio; in such scenario, there's clearly no place for propaganda. If you have read Caesar's battle reports, you know better than that; there's virtually no reliable casualty figure within his accounts, with the relative exception of Dyrrhachium (relative, because ha pretended that of his almost one thousand casualties "the greatest part of all these perished without a wound, being trodden to death ... by reason of the terror and flight of their own men"). Vale bene et nil desperandum

Analogous to the Soviets in WWII, Roman casualties reports were essentially propaganda and almost always totally unrealistic .

I'm not a big fan of Justinian as a conqueror, but as a whole his foreign policy was not a failure and could hardly been responsible for the shrinkage of the Empire; chronology simply doesn't add up. The Roman Empire remained large and strong for quite a long time. The Vandal state disappeared and the Ostrogoths' defeat proved to be definitive; in any case, no Germanic kingdom ever returned to the Empire by its own choice, and the Romans had vast experience with their foedariti for expecting otherwise, no matter their "romanisation" degree. Rome, Ravenna and at least half of the re-conquered Italy were still under Imperial rule two centuries after Justinian; Africa and Sicily were firmly Roman up to the Arab conquest; and the last Roman stronghold in Italy wasn't conquered (by the Normans) until the XII century. If the Empire was eventually not able to recover its lost territories, the main explanation would be Muhammad; the powerful Caliphate was essentially unbeatable, and the Arab conquests deprived the Empire from most of their economic infrastructure.

Augustus didn't simply come to rule when the war fortunately stopped; the century-long Civil Wars period ended precisely because Octavius won, against all odds. Augustus and his party (particularly Agrippa, Maecenas, Salvidienus, Sallustius, Tiberius and even Livia) were the architects of the most extensive administrative change by far in the whole history of Rome, regular and aptly called the Roman Revolution; the resulting system persisted for centuries and its prosperity was unparalleled across the preindustrial western world. The pertinent literature is simply too extensive; I would recommend E. Gruen and R. Syme.